Disinformation » Revolution

Violent Or Nonviolent Revolution?

JacobSloan — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:00:46 +0000

Via Naked Capitalism, researcher Erica Chenoweth attempted to qualify which style of insurgency is more effective — she claims nonviolent action has a better yield:

Occupy’s public discussions on “diversity of tactics” have often lacked historical perspective; discussions, at least online, have tended to degenerate to “Ghandi!” “No, ANC!” Now, however, Erica Chenoweth has developed a dataset and analyzed the historical record. Below are the results of her study of 323  non-violent and violent campaigns  from  1900‐2006. I’m sure, readers, that like any study, Chenoweth’s work is open to challenge on any number of grounds. That said, surely looking to the historical record to see what’s worked isn’t such a bad thing?

New Year’s Revolution

aaroncynic — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 08:10:16 +0000

Natalie W writes at Diatribe Media:

We’re breathing the very last gasp of the holiday cycle. First it was the overeating celebration, where we shoved every last delicious morsel of multiple dinners in to our mouths and tried not to nap in front of the football game. Then, it was the winter holiday, where we all spent too much money or were upset that we couldn’t spend more money to demonstrate affection on our beloveds. Then, it was the year-end party where we bid adieu to last year with booze, food, and dancings.

In the cold light of 2012, we took stock of the confetti-strewn, champagne soaked, glitterbomb of our lives and resolved to do better this year. On the heels of the self-focused 6-ish weeks, 40 to 45% of American adults make one or more resolutions each year. The top New Year’s resolutions are about weight loss, exercise, consuming less alcohol, quitting smoking cigarettes, finding the love of the your life, better money management and debt reduction. Further analysis shows exactly what we’re attempting to improve and how we’re only setting ourselves up to fail.

New Year’s Resolution: lose weight/exercise more/drink less:

We’re all fat and lazy, duh. We just spent the last six weeks shoving so much alternately delectable and downright awful food paired with heavy drinks and boozy bevies down our throats. All we have been doing is eating, drinking, watching holiday specials on tv, and shopping, which does not count for exercise. (Full disclosure: the author has a legit potbelly.) We live in a truly body-conscious society where we are not considered attractive even to ourselves until we’re living up to a Hollywoodized or Photoshopped standard of beauty-slash-reality. Let it go. Beauty is in brains, not butts or abs or chiseled upper arms. Start doing interesting things that lead to connections with others through foundation-building conversation over beers or coffee or dinner. In creating something other than your body to focus on, the depths of personality, dreams, goals, and offerings can be discovered and then shared.

New Year’s Resolution: fall in love/find the perfect partner

This resolution equates human relationships to car keys. Love is not something to be found; it’s a state of being, of creating and then nurturing. Of course we all want companionship but emphasizing the necessity of the existence of a relationship for happiness is not a sound foundation for a healthy involvement.

These resolutions are so self-focused and so individualistic, there’s barely any room for anyone else to squeeze in their goals. It’s no surprise that 75 percent of these resolutions are not maintained past the first week of making them.

Seventy-five percent of resolutions are not maintained past the first week of making them. Of the remaining 25 percent of resolutions, 71 percent do not survive the second week. These resolutions are so self-focused and so individualistic, there’s barely any room for anyone else to squeeze in their goals. Then everyone forgets or decides their pledges are too hard and reverts to their same old selves. Currently, we’re reaching that time in the new year where we give up on, or are about to abandon, improving ourselves and revert back to the lonely, lazy, boozy person we were at the end of 2011. Instead of trying to fix ourselves, failing, and then beating ourselves up about it, let’s consider a new concept of resolutions for this New Year. Let’s endeavor to better society for everyone, not just our individual selves.

So this 2012, let go of feelings of depression about the current failure of self-improvement, and declare that we revolutionize (or reform) the resolution process and determine goals we can actually achieve. If we endeavor to better society, we will find ourselves inspired, engaged, and meeting a host of new people at the same time.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

Saudi Arabia: The Arab Spring With A Media Blackout

JacobSloan — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:45:47 +0000

Guernica notes that while recent uprisings in Egypt, Syria, et cetera received plenty of sympathetic press coverage, the third rail seems to be Saudi Arabia, with the Western media refusing to report on serious unrest that has occurred there this year:

Hear the one about the Arab Spring in Saudi Arabia that nobody noticed?No, this is not a joke. With the Syrian regime, long out of favor with the West, we heard about the uprising from the beginning. In the case of Libya, run by the fiercely independent and eccentric Qaddafi, much of the world’s press credulously rushed to print every rumor about regime excesses.

In the case of the mother of all petro-allies, Saudi Arabia, however, protests have been met with near silence by the media and no expressions of sympathy for the dissenters by Western governments.

Here’s the background: On November 21, government troops opened fire on demonstrators in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, killing at least four and injuring more. Given the general paucity of demonstrations in a country where dissent is dealt with fiercely, the unrest and violence seemed a highly newsworthy development.

The next day, the Middle-East-based Al Jazeera English, the “best” Western source of news from the region, punted. Instead of getting direct eyewitness accounts that might anger the Saudi leadership (close allies of the Emir of Qatar, who owns Al Jazeera), the network used an old trick. It quoted a Western news agency, the French outfit Agence France Press, which merely reported the Saudi government’s version of events.

Two days after Al Jazeera, the Associated Press had its own report, also based on the Saudi spokesman. The article did note “a series of clashes between police and protesters in the country’s Shiite-dominated eastern region, starting in the spring.” The purported context comes in the final paragraph:

“There is a long history of discord between the kingdom’s Sunni rulers and the Shiite minority concentrated in the east, Saudi Arabia’s key oil-producing region. Shiites make up 10 percent of the kingdom’s 23 million citizens and complain of discrimination, saying they are barred from key positions in the military and government and are not given a proportionate share of the country’s wealth.”

The salient point in Saudi Arabia, however, is not really ethnic discrimination, which exists throughout the world. It is the story of the avarice and brutality through which one extended family dominates a country.

In Libya, the uprising was dominated by a distinct tribal opposition, yet it was quickly characterized as representing broad national sentiment, with a kind of nobility and inevitability. Not so (up to now) with reporting on the Saudi protests. In truth, dissatisfaction with the Saudi royal family is hardly limited to the Shiites, and the levels of anger are probably as great and perhaps greater than that felt by the average Libyan toward Qaddafi.

Those wanting a closer look at what is going on in Saudi Arabia can go to the site Liveleak, where there’s highly disturbing video accompanied by this text: “Qatif—Firing live bullets at the demonstrators November 21, 2011: Video shows the brutal style Saudi security forces in dealing with the demonstrators by firing live bullets.” Another source is a blog called Angry Arab News Service, which features video in which a large and vocal group in Qatif are apparently chanting “Death to the House of Saud.”

That kind of material seems to warrant worldwide attention. And with that, we might reasonably expect the protests to grow. But the coverage has not come, nor the greater uprising.

Who’s to blame? Everyone, really. But based on its claim to be the gold standard, we focus on The New York Times. According to a search of the database Nexis-Lexis, the Times ran nothing at all on Qatif until Sunday November 27, when it featured a survey of turmoil throughout the region.

Yet the Times should have realizing that it was looking at a pattern. After all, the paper did cover a previous incident in Qatif—back in March. It was a single article, with a Beirut dateline: “Saudi police officers opened fire at a protest march in a restive, oil-rich province on Thursday, wounding at least three people, according to witnesses and a Saudi government official.”

Could it have something to do with Saudi Arabia’s indispensability as an ally and supplier of oil? In which case, traditional news reporting standards do not apply?

And did anyone ask the U.S. government, so quick to condemn Qaddafi for his crackdown on demonstrators, if it had any reaction to the Saudi crackdown on demonstrators? Doesn’t look like it.

Meanwhile, what of this scapegoating of Iran for what seems to be authentic Saudi dissent? How does this dovetail with the overall western effort to characterize Iran as behind every nefarious act, even the ludicrous-sounding plot announced months ago by the White House, in which the Iranians were purportedly trying to recruit Mexican drug gangs to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.?

Police State Crackdown on Occupy Oakland (Video)

Abby Martin — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 05:23:45 +0000

Abby Martin of Media Roots went to Occupy Oakland at 4:00 a.m. to cover the second police raid and crackdown against the peaceful protesters at Frank Ogawa Plaza.

The footage shows the intensity in the air leading up to the raid and the insane amount of police presence that showed up to destroy the encampment. Mayor Jean Quan’s legal adviser resigned at 2 a.m. in protest to the heavy police response.

CIA Tracks Revolt by Tweet and Facebook

HAL9000 — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 22:57:12 +0000

Didn’t we know this already? Reports Kimberly Dozier on the AP:

McLEAN, VA — In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the “ninja librarians” are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

The group’s effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

The agency’s Open Source Center sometimes looks at 5 million tweets a day. The analysts are also checking out TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that people can access and contribute to openly.

The Associated Press got an apparently unprecedented view of the center’s operations, including a tour of the main facility. The AP agreed not to reveal its exact location and to withhold the identities of some who work there because much of the center’s work is secret.

From Arabic to Mandarin, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in a native tongue. They cross-reference it with a local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House. There might be a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Meet the Anti-Leader of Occupy Wall Street

Join Or DIE — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 18:04:48 +0000

Drake Bennett writes in Bloomberg Business:

David Graeber likes to say that he had three goals for the year: promote his book, learn to drive, and launch a worldwide revolution. The first is going well, the second has proven challenging, and the third is looking up.

Graeber is a 50-year-old anthropologist — among the brightest, some argue, of his generation — who made his name with innovative theories on exchange and value, exploring phenomena such as Iroquois wampum and the Kwakiutl potlatch. An American, he teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. He’s also an anarchist and radical organizer, a veteran of many of the major left-wing demonstrations of the past decade: Quebec City and Genoa, the Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia and New York, the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, the London tuition protests earlier this year. This summer, Graeber was a key member of a small band of activists who quietly planned, then noisily carried out, the occupation of Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park, providing the focal point for what has grown into an amorphous global movement known as Occupy Wall Street.

It would be wrong to call Graeber a leader of the protesters, since their insistently nonhierarchical philosophy makes such a concept heretical. Nor is he a spokesman, since they have refused thus far to outline specific demands. Even in Zuccotti Park, his name isn’t widely known. But he has been one of the group’s most articulate voices, able to frame the movement’s welter of hopes and grievances within a deeper critique of the historical moment …

More: Bloomberg Business

Police Attack Occupy Oakland

majestic — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:10:50 +0000

Is this the moment when Occupy turned from protest to revolt? The San Francisco ABC affiliate KGO-TV reports on a dramatic turn in California (for an alternative take check out the #OakFoSho live stream):

Thousands of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters peacefully marched in the streets of Oakland on Wednesday picketing banks and disrupting operations at the nation’s fifth-busiest port.

Around 10:30 p.m. a group of a couple hundred protesters went into the Travelers Aid building to occupy it. For a while the crowd danced in the streets outside the building and used large dumpsters to block the road leading to the building on Telegraph and 16th, near Frank Ogawa Plaza and hung a banner saying, “Occupy Everything.” Around 3:30 a.m. the protesters decided to peacefully head back to their camp at Frank Ogawa Plaza and back away from the police line.

At 11:45 p.m., we started to receive reports via Twitter that police were moving in on protesters at the Travelers Aid building that occupiers took over. If you have any photos or video of Downtown Oakland, please send them to us at: uReport@kgo-tv.com.

Bay City News reported that tear gas was deployed on an Occupy Oakland crowd marching through downtown Oakland early this morning…

[continues at KGO-TV]

Occupy Oakland Police Following Brutal Raid: ‘Just Following Orders’

Abby Martin — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:05:19 +0000

Abby Martin of Media Roots went out to cover the immediate aftermath of the brutal police raid of Occupy Oakland at 6:20 a.m. on October 25, 2011. 500+ Oakland PD used tear gas, rubber bullets and completely leveled two encampments of peaceful protestors practicing civil disobedience. 90+ protestors were then arrested.

Contact the Mayor Jean Quan here: www.oaklandnet.com/contactmayor.asp

‘Today Libya, Tomorrow Wall Street’ (Video)

Join Or DIE — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:18:19 +0000

Via Max Keiser:

16 Things Libya Will Never See Again

Saya — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 00:51:40 +0000

There is no electricity bill in Libya; electricity is free for all its citizens.
There is no interest on loans, banks in Libya are state-owned and loans given to all its citizens at zero percent interest by law.
Having a home considered a human right in Libya.
All newlyweds in Libya receive $60,000 dinar (U.S.$50,000) by the government to buy their first apartment so to help start up the family.
Education and medical treatments are free in Libya. Before Gaddafi only 25 percent of Libyans were literate. Today, the figure is 83 percent.
Should Libyans want to take up farming career, they would receive farming land, a farming house, equipments, seeds and livestock to kickstart their farms are all for free.
If Libyans cannot find the education or medical facilities they need, the government funds them to go abroad, for it is not only paid for, but they get a U.S.$2,300/month for accommodation and car allowance.
If a Libyan buys a car, the government subsidizes 50 percent of the price.
The price of petrol in Libya is $0.14 per liter.
Libya has no external debt and its reserves amounting to $150 billion are now frozen globally.
If a Libyan is unable to get employment after graduation the state would pay the average salary of the profession, as if he or she is employed, until employment is found.
A portion of every Libyan oil sale is credited directly to the bank accounts of all Libyan citizens.
A mother who gives birth to a child receive U.S.$5,000.
40 loaves of bread in Libya costs $0.15.
25 percent of Libyans have a university degree.
Gaddafi carried out the world’s largest irrigation project, known as the Great Manmade River project, to make water readily available throughout the desert country.

Occupy For A General Strike (#HitEmWhereItHurts)

god — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:20:24 +0000

Mickey Z. writes on the Fair Share of the Common Heritage:

“A strike is an incipient revolution. Many large revolutions have grown out of a small strike.” —William “Big Bill” Haywood

Thanks to the popularity of my recent articles here at Fair Share of the Common Heritage, I found myself recruited to write something about the prospect of a U.S.-based general strike.

So, off I went, scanning news across the interwebs … My eyes widened when I read: “Social groups reiterated their call to a general strike for 24 hours November 14, asking the labor, productive and academic sectors to join the mobilization, guaranteeing it will be peaceful and with innovative forms of protest.”

But alas, it was an update from the Dominican Republic. Shortly thereafter, my heart jumped at these words: “Trade unions have called a general strike in protest.”

Great — but not for the US — as the article was in relation to Portugal. Then again, I felt excitement: “A 48-hour general strike to be held on Wednesday and Thursday is set to ground flights for two days and cripple public and many private services.”

That story, of course, was about Greece. Finally, I found: “Strikers at the car assembly plant ended their eight-day occupation of the plant late Friday night, under threat of police violence. About 1,500 police troops moved into the factory early that day to enforce a high court order to end the occupation. Workers continued with their strike, however, camping outside the factory some 100 meters away.”

Read More: Mickey Z on the Fair Share of the Common Heritage

Media Roots: Occupy Wall Street, Divide & Conquer, Medical Marijuana Crackdown

Abby Martin — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:51:35 +0000

Via Media Roots:

Abby & Robbie Martin cover the Occupy Wall Street Movement: the divide and conquer tactics being used to discredit OWS, the different schools of thought and ideology within the movement and the original demands made by the U.S. Day of Rage; the Obama administration’s shocking crackdown on medical marijuana and new federal law banning medical marijuana card holders from owning firearms; Blackwater and the privatization of the armed forces: is the corporatization of the U.S. military preventing an anti-war rebellion similar to that seen in the ’60s?

Muammar Gaddafi Is Dead

majestic — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:35:32 +0000

Reuters reports that Libya’s longstanding leader has been killed in the NATO-sponsored revolution:

Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi died of wounds suffered on Thursday as fighters battling to complete an eight-month-old uprising against his rule overran his hometown Sirte, Libya’s interim rulers said.

His killing, which came swiftly after his capture near Sirte, is the most dramatic single development in the Arab Spring revolts that have unseated rulers in Egypt and Tunisia and threatened the grip on power of the leaders of Syria and Yemen.

“He (Gaddafi) was also hit in his head,” National Transitional Council official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters. “There was a lot of firing against his group and he died.”

Mlegta told Reuters earlier that Gaddafi, who was in his late 60s, was captured and wounded in both legs at dawn on Thursday as he tried to flee in a convoy which NATO warplanes attacked. He said he had been taken away by an ambulance.

There was no independent confirmation of his remarks.

An anti-Gaddafi fighter said Gaddafi had been found hiding in a hole in the ground and had said “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot” to the men who grabbed him…

[continues at Reuters]

Media Roots: Why Occupy Oakland?

Abby Martin — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 19:35:38 +0000

Abby Martin of Media Roots conducts on the spot interviews with Oakland residents about why they want change on the first two days of Occupy Oakland:

Ralph Nader on the Two-Party Dictatorship, Anwar al-Awlaki, Occupy Wall Street (Video)

Abby Martin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 00:29:08 +0000

Via Media Roots:

Abby Martin of Media Roots talks to political activist and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader about Project Censored, the landscape of media censorship, the establishment co-opting of the tea party, the two party dictatorship in the US, Obama’s exacerbation of Bush era policies and the recent assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki:

Supercomputer Predicts Revolution

majestic — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 13:01:19 +0000

OK, so it predicted Egypt and Libya – how about the United States? From BBC News:

Feeding a supercomputer with news stories could help predict major world events, according to US research.

A study, based on millions of articles, charted deteriorating national sentiment ahead of the recent revolutions in Libya and Egypt.

While the analysis was carried out retrospectively, scientists say the same processes could be used to anticipate upcoming conflict.

The system also picked up early clues about Osama Bin Laden’s location.

Kalev Leetaru, from the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science, presented his findings in the journal First Monday.

[continues at BBC News]

Ask Not What Facebook Can Do For You, But What Facebook Can Do For Your Country…

ralph — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:04:26 +0000

Granted some memes will be more interesting to the Pentagon than others. David Streitfeld reports in the NY Times:

The Pentagon is developing plans to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as both a resource and a weapon in future conflicts. Its research and development agency is offering $42 million in funding to anyone who can help.

Social media will change the nature of warfare just as surely as the telegraph, the radio and the telephone did, and the Pentagon is fearful of being caught short. Some of its goals were laid out in a document being circulated among potential researchers and is to be presented at a briefing on Tuesday in Arlington, Va., at the offices of the military contractor System Planning Corporation.

As social media play increasingly large roles in fomenting unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, the military wants systems to be able to detect and track the spread of ideas both quickly and on a broad scale. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is soliciting innovative proposals to help build what would be, at its most basic level, an Internet meme tracker …

Chris Hedges’s Endgame Strategy: Why The Revolution Must Start In America

BananaFamine — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 07:59:13 +0000

Synopsis via The Raw Story:

Pulitzer-winning author and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has a revolutionary worldview. In the video below, his recent “Endgame Strategy” piece for AdBusters is read aloud by George Atherton. His conclusions are chilling, but not entirely hopeless. “We will have to take care of ourselves,” he wrote. “We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.

Here’s Chris Hedges’ article in AdBusters:

The unrest in the Middle East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch toward freedom and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be pleasant or easy.

The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking …

Piece continues at AdBusters.

The Weather Underground and Ronald Stark

James Curcio — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 07:01:29 +0000

From Modern Mythology:

Named after that line from a Dylan tune, (”You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”) the Weather Underground were a “radical left” organization that seemed to use white guilt to crystallize the need for revolution. Not so much on the methodology, but culturally, the forces that created the WUO couldn’t have been far from our minds when dreaming up the fictional side to the Mother Hive Brain.

Here is a rather good documentary on the Weather Men which is available free online. Watch the whole documentary on YouTube, it’s also available on Netflix On-Demand.

Skilluminati Research has an excellent write up on a figure that had connection with this organization, using more methods sanctioned by the need to counter fascist order with blind chaos, Ronald Stark :

“He had a mission, he explained, to use LSD in order to facilitate the overthrow of the political systems of both the capitalist West and communist East by inducing altered states of consciousness in millions of people. Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics.”

(Thanks to Skilluminati Research for the Ronald Stark (article.)

Generation OS13: A Generation On the Verge of Revolution (Video)

BananaFamine — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:27:45 +0000

Anonymous Declares War On The System (Video)

BananaFamine — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 15:54:04 +0000

Noam Chomsky: Is The World Too Big To Fail?

JacobSloan — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:28:45 +0000

In a talk given in Amsterdam, Noam Chomsky weighs in on revolutionary unrest in the Middle East and the United States’ unsustainable foreign policy and domestic power structure. Via the Huffington Post:

Support for democracy is the province of ideologists and propagandists. In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship.

Elections have become a charade, run by the public relations industry. After his 2008 victory, Obama won an award from the industry for the best marketing campaign of the year. Executives were euphoric. In the business press they explained that they had been marketing candidates like other commodities since Ronald Reagan, but 2008 was their greatest achievement and would change the style in corporate boardrooms. The 2012 election is expected to cost $2 billion, mostly in corporate funding. Small wonder that Obama is selecting business leaders for top positions. The public is angry and frustrated, but as long as the Muasher principle prevails, that doesn’t matter.

The Muasher doctrine is rational and venerable. To mention just one case that is highly relevant today, in internal discussion in 1958, president Eisenhower expressed concern about “the campaign of hatred” against us in the Arab world, not by governments, but by the people. The National Security Council (NSC) explained that there is a perception in the Arab world that the U.S. supports dictatorships and blocks democracy and development so as to ensure control over the resources of the region. Furthermore, the perception is basically accurate, the NSC concluded, and that is what we should be doing, relying on the Muasher doctrine. Pentagon studies conducted after 9/11 confirmed that the same holds today.

Read the rest at the Huffington Post.

Hip-Hop And The Middle East Uprisings

BananaFamine — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:03:27 +0000

Via Freemuse:

Hip-hop plays a central role in the revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and Libya. Rap songs create an important platform for communication creating moral support and encouraging a spirit of resistance and revolt against the regime.

“The Arabic revolutions have largely been a revolt by the young, who have made clear they are no longer willing to live in a climate of corruption, repression and hopelessness. And, like every youth revolution, this one has its own sound,” wrote Anne-Beatrice Clasmann of the US news site M&C: “Since the weight of the protests have been carried by the young, the protest songs are not the classic marches or ballads that were used when Arabic countries rose up against colonizers. Instead, today’s protest songs are all hip-hop and Oriental pop. Many of the songs aren’t available in stores. To find them, one has to go to YouTube or other websites.”

“The fact that many musicians place themselves in the front line has inspired a lot of people in the Middle East to question the rules that the system has pulled down over their heads,” told Freemuse Officer Martin Buch Larsen who recently travelled in the region:

“The rappers are in their 20s, often reasonably well educated, and they see music as a way they can express themselves on the issues they are confronted with in their daily lives. They rap about unemployment, poor housing, mismanagement, corruption. And that is what makes the political leaders so furious. But the leaders’ rage has had the opposite effect: Rappers have suddenly acquired a kind of revolutionary celebrity,” he said.

For more information, see original article.

Egyptian Blogger Maikel Nabil, Critical of Military, Jailed By New Egyptian Government

BananaFamine — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 04:17:52 +0000

Via BBC News:

A military court in Egypt has sentenced an internet activist to three years in jail for criticising the armed forces. Maikel Nabil was arrested last month for blogs that criticised the army’s role during anti-government protests.

The 26-year-old is thought to be the first blogger jailed in Egypt since the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak.

Activists said the trial set a dangerous precedent at a time when Egypt was trying to move away from the alleged abuses of the Mubarak era. Lawyers representing Maikel Nabil have criticised the conduct of the military court.

“We are in a state of shock because [on Sunday] they told us the decision would be on Tuesday, so the family and lawyer left. Afterwards the court announced its decision,” said Gamal Eid, a lawyer who heads the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information.

Mr Eid said the trial was unfair because the court did not even consider the content of Mr Nabil’s blog posts.

For more information, see original article.

VICE Magazine: The New Libyans

phunkychic666 — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 01:51:21 +0000

Photo Courtesy of Trevor Snapp / VICE

Trevor Snapp writes in VICE Magazine:

The Friday after former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak fled Cairo, I strolled through the postrevolution euphoria in Tahrir Square: men and women on their knees reciting thankful prayers, cheering teenagers, and giddy, hopeful children. It was a brand-new world, and the people’s revolution seemed unstoppable, which proved to be the case as insurrections and protests spread through Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Syria, and God knows where else by the time you’re reading this article.

A few days later, I left for the Libyan border. According to Twitter, it was open for the first time in decades. Even more than in Egypt, uncertainty counterbalanced jubilation as generations of repressed tensions were only beginning to uncoil. Would Colonel Muammar Gaddafi gracefully forfeit his country and leave peacefully, or would he ensure its destruction by stubbornly refusing to abandon his self-appointed post? All bets were on the latter, and soon the world knew his answer: “I will die as a martyr at the end,” Gaddafi said in a televised statement. “I have not yet ordered the use of force, not yet ordered one bullet to be fired… When I do, everything will burn.” When I arrived, however, the Libyan people were still celebrating the victories they had achieved — it was a joyful calm before a brutal storm with no end in sight.

The Human Agency of Revolution

BananaFamine — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 20:41:19 +0000

Scholar Tarak Barkawi argues revolutions are caused by human agency; not telecommunications technologies, in Al Jazeera:

To listen to the hype about social networking websites and the Egyptian revolution, one would think it was Silicon Valley and not the Egyptian people who overthrew Mubarak.

Via its technologies, the West imagines itself to have been the real agent in the uprising. Since the internet developed out of a US Defense Department research project, it could be said the Pentagon did it, along with Egyptian youth imitating wired hipsters from London and Los Angeles.

Most narratives of globalisation are fantastically Eurocentric, stories of Western white men burdened with responsibility for interconnecting the world, by colonising it, providing it with economic theories and finance, and inventing communications technologies. Of course globalisation is about flows of people as well, about diasporas and cultural fusion.

But neither version is particularly useful for organising resistance to the local dictatorship. In any case, the internet was turned off at decisive moments in the Egyptian uprising, and it was ordinary Egyptians, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, who toppled the regime, not the hybrid youth of the global professional classes.

For more information, see original article.

The Mystery Behind Gadhafi’s Birth: He’s Jewish?

bluemana — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 18:24:17 +0000

Muammar Gaddafi (left) with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1969.

At first I thought this was an April Fools’ joke … Dana Kennedy writes on AOL News:

What if the biggest mystery surrounding Col. Moammar Gadhafi had nothing to do with his long, brutal reign as the world’s most eccentric and violent leader turned pariah?

And what if a long-lost letter from a Catholic cardinal who knew Gadhafi’s true identity was evidence that could have solved the mystery?

To many Libyan people, the biggest question mark about Gadhafi does not involve his repressive and dictatorial rule, delusional statements or brazen lies. Behind closed doors, for years, they’ve wondered if he is Jewish. Last week the issue came out in the open, as NBC’s Richard Engel reported from Libya that one in five rebels was fighting Gadhafi because he believes the leader is Jewish.

Conflicting reports surrounding Gadhafi’s birth have circulated since about 1970, two years after a Gadhafi-led coup made him the de facto leader of Libya.

In a handful of biographies from years ago, mostly written by Europeans, Gadhafi is almost always described as being born in a tent in Sirt, the son of a poor, illiterate Bedouin sheepherder and his wife.

But the hushed-up rumors in Libya about Gadhafi’s parentage involved his mother being Jewish. The stories have conflicted over the years, and the narratives are different. One had her converting to Judaism at age 9. In another, Gadhafi’s grandmother is Jewish but leaves her husband for an Arab sheik.

Anti-Protest Laws Being Pushed Through Egyptian Government

BananaFamine — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:31:28 +0000

Over 1 million protestors in Tahrir Square demanded the removal of the Mubarak regime on February 8, 2011. Photo: Jonathan Rashad (CC)

Ahram Online reports:

The Egyptian cabinet approved yesterday a decree-law that criminalises strikes, protests, demonstrations and sit-ins that interrupt private or state owned businesses or affect the economy in any way.

The decree-law also assigns severe punishment to those who call for or incite action, with the maximum sentence one year in prison and fines of up to half a million pounds.

The new law, which still needs to be approved by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, will be in force as long as the emergency law is still in force. Egypt has been in a state of emergency since the assassination of former president Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Since former president Hosni Mubarak stepped down on 11 February, Egypt has witnessed escalating nationwide labour strikes and political protests. Amongst those protesting have been university students, political activists, railway workers, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, journalists, pensioners and the police force.

Many labourers have expressed their shock at the decree. “We really had hopes that the new government will support us and look into our demands. We expected them to say we have all of your legal demands on our desks and there is a timeline of a month or two within which they will be achieved,” said Ali Fotouh, a driver in the public transportation sector.

“I don’t understand what they mean by protests that affect the traffic and the business. This is not fair, why don’t you solve our demands so that we don’t go on strikes. This tone reminds me of the old days of Mubarak, threats and oppression used by the regime. This is no longer valid after January 25 Revolution.”

For more information, see original article.

Media Roots Interview With Cindy Sheehan

Abby Martin — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 03:40:29 +0000

This is a special Media Roots TV interview conducted by Abby Martin with Cindy Sheehan, mother who has made the ultimate sacrifice and fearless anti-war activist. She relays her powerfully lucid point of view in a candid interview at her home on February 6th, 2011.

For more information about Cindy go to http://www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com/

http://www.MediaRoots.org

Self-Immolation and the Heart of Revolution

James Curcio — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 18:20:04 +0000

“It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.” — Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International, at a Human Rights Day ceremony on 10th December 1961

In November, 1990 a man set himself on fire in front of the U.S. capitol, the news reports from the time say that the reasons for the man’s act were unknown, no riots were forthcoming. Last year the cultural shifts in Egypt, Yemen and Algeria proved a different outcome in light of similar self-immolation. As individuals express their anger, alienation and rejection in self willed conflagration it is igniting their communities into violent uprisings shaking the foundations of global culture.

As I’m writing this a young man sits in protest in a Palestinian Mosque, part of the March 15 Youth Coalition who set up tents in the Bethlehem municipality to demand a new Palestinian national council and a unified Palestine. He is threatening to set himself on fire if the Coalition’s demands are not taken seriously. Unlike the young gunmen we have seen emerge in the United States, whose outward acts of inflamed anxiety cause communities to hold vigils and encourage greater controls, these self sacrificial immolations “change the quality of the substance,” of the estrangement, isolation and abuse, to open up the opportunity for cultural change.

Article by David Metcalfe via Modern Mythology.